Over the course of his first year in the White House, Donald Trump has nursed a curious and seemingly indefatigable obsession with Hillary Clinton. But in the months since Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the ongoing F.B.I. collusion investigation, and as Special Counsel Robert Mueller has drawn ever nearer to Trump’s inner circle, the president’s attacks have taken a darker turn, devolving into public castigations of his own Justice Department and top lawyer for failing to investigate and prosecute his one-time political opponent for a myriad of rumored crimes. Now, after much presidential browbeating, the D.O.J. has reportedly revived its inquiry into the Clinton foundation, lending credence to growing fears that Trump is pushing to weaponize government institutions against his enemies.

According to multiple media reports published Friday, the F.B.I. is looking into allegations that Clinton fostered a “pay-to-play” culture during her State Department tenure, giving undue access and favorable treatment to major Clinton Foundation donors. The probe is being run out of the F.B.I. field office in Little Rock, Arkansas, where the Clinton family charity’s offices are located. The D.O.J.’s decision to reopen the probe—which was effectively closed in 2016—represents a major win for the president and Republicans who claim Clinton received favorable treatment from law-enforcement officials under Barack Obama.

Legal experts, meanwhile, see a potentially dangerous politicization of America’s top, and historically nonpartisan, law-enforcement agency. Former Chicago prosecutor Renato Mariotti told me it was “very bizarre” for the D.O.J. to reopen an investigation previously closed due to insufficient evidence. “My concern about it is that the decisions aren’t being made for nonpartisan prosecutorial reasons, and you could have a concern that there might be partisan influence into the charging decisions by the D.O.J. and the F.B.I.,” he added. William Jeffress, who represented “Scooter” Libby during an ethics probe, expressed similar concerns. “This is the same investigation we heard about in 2015, now reopened without any new facts being discovered? For lawyers in my line of work, it is disheartening to see law-enforcement investigations being used for obviously partisan political purposes,” he told me.

After deploying his allies in Congress to defensive ends, Trump now appears to be using the D.O.J. to play offense.
White-collar defense attorney Stanley Brand, who represented senior White House aide George Stephanopoulos in the Whitewater investigation, credited the move to the “highly charged environment” that has manifested as a result of the “warring factions between Republicans and Democrats over the Mueller inquiry.” Other commentators have raised another, more tantalizing possibility: that Sessions’s D.O.J., in going through the motions of scrutinizing Clinton, is playing defense itself, providing Trump and other Republicans a means to vent as the investigation quietly fizzles out once more.

The revelation that the Sessions-led Justice Department is seeking to re-litigate the Clinton Foundation scandal comes as the battle between said factions has reached a fever pitch, with Trumpworld and Republican lawmakers redoubling their efforts to discredit Mueller’s investigation. Senators Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham entered the fray on Friday, filing a congressional criminal referral recommending that the D.O.J. look into filing charges against Christopher Steele, the ex-British spook who penned the infamous Trump-Russia dossier. Mariotti characterized the move as a similar P.R. stunt. ”[They didn’t file the referral] because they have a genuine concern that there is a crime the F.B.I. is not aware of,” he said. “They did it because they are politicians trying to make a political point.”